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Thursday, 8 March 2012

Day 6: A Favourite God

I’ve not much worked with God Forms or even God Energy so I was a little stumped on what God to choose for this (being that I don’t have a favourite) so I did myself a little research on Joelle’s Sacred Grove and came across The Green Man as a Deity. It fit perfectly because I do like to work with nature, am an avid gardener and so he seemed to fit.

The Green Man

A horned deity of trees and green growing things of Earth; God of the woodlands. In Old Welsh his name is Arddhu (the Dark One), Atho, or the Horned God.

One of the most ancient figures in European tradition, pre-dating perhaps even the Aryan invasions, He seems to be a God of vegetative strength, a masculine figure of fertility and life-energy. He is usually imaged as a large or giant male, clad entirely, or perhaps actually composed entirely, in green leaves. He appears on the fringes of popular awareness in a bewildering number of guises.

His is an image which transcended all other Celtic God forms and became a version of the Christian Devil every bit as potent as the Horned God. His randy woodland image became firmly linked in the minds of the churchmen with "evil" witches who cavorted with him under the light of the full moon. He is possibly an Oak King image, a symbol of fertility and of the waxing year. He is also linked to Cernunnos, the Horned God of the wild. Archetypally, he is the male fertility principle of the Earth Mother.